Nature of the USSR

[Astarte]

I am curious as to what revlefters consider the USSR.

[Nox]

Depends what era of the USSR you're talking about.

In my opinion, at times it was borderline Socialism, at other times it was a Degenerated Workers' State, at other times it was State Capitalism, and at other times it was verging on Beaurecratic Collectivism.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

When i'm being lazy I describe the USSR as State Capitalist from its inception.

I believe somewhere on here i've elucidated a theory about it being a deformed bureaucratic state, and that calling it a workers' state is unsatisfactory. I dunno, it's somewhere on here, so I voted deformed workers' state, though it's not what I believe, it's just closest.

[Tablo]

State capitalism for pretty much its entire existence.

[Jose Gracchus]

The problem almost all theories have is their poor treatment integrating the perceived political economy/mode of production in the USSR with its historical context, relevance in light of historical capitalist uneven and combined development, and with the global development of capitalism generally. Also there is the simple matter than the Soviet state itself, as well as society and economy within the former Russian Empire evolved considerably through 1917-1991. The seizure of power and immediate political and social crisis, the consolidation of a Bolshevik single-party state and the beginning of the Civil War, "war communism", NEP, the great "turn" of 1928 and the First Five-Year Plan, the maturing and war-time Stalinist economy, the post-Stalin economy, and progressive decline all had changes in features.

Along with this, there's the fact many people approach "state capitalism" and "degenerated workers' state" with resort to arguments from the era of the NEP and the early Stalinist economy. The NEP had the state sector organized into autonomous "trusts" engaging in for-profit production-for-sale, hard currency and finance, small private enteprises and NEPmen, and a private agricultural economy. The mature Stalinist economy fully organized the peasantry into the state sector, either fully (state farms or sovkhozy) or in compromise (collective farms or kolkhozy), especially in the early period enterprises would be run nearly fully administratively, for production quotas, without regard to profit. After the 1965 Liberman-Kosygin reforms, enterprise independence and profitability became considerably more important. Some bourgeois economists have even regarded this as a transition from supposed administrative planning to indicative planning (which is used in welfare state capitalist societies). After 1987, the Law on State Enterprise and Law on Cooperatives by Gorbachev moved considerably to a "market socialist" economy. The greatest leap towards the Western-style market since 1928.

Most political economies of the USSR are very slippery with the nature, composition and origin of the ruling group and even worse with explaining the massive qualitative social transformation under Stalin's government, compared to prior to his assumption of power.

[Comrade Trotsky]

Definitely a Bureaucratic Collectivist State.

[Q]

It was clearly not capitalist in any sense of the word. Commodity production? Money? Surplus value? Didn't exist.

Was it socialist? Well, you could say that for the very brief period the working class was actually in power. But in the period from the first soviet closures in 1918 to the Stalin constitution in 1936, there was clearly a period of retreat after retreat, changing qualitatively into a counterrevolution within the revolution along the way, after which a bureaucratic apparatus remained in power.

Was it a degenerated (not deformed) workers state? You could argue this was the case in the period of the retreats. But after that was consolidated in favor of the bureaucracy, it ceased to be a workers state in any sense of the word. It is also somewhat of a problematic term: When is a workers state so degenerated that it ceases to be one?

Was it then bureaucratic collectivist? I remain unconvinced, although I'll have to study that idea more before giving a final opinion.

It was what Trotsky called a Bonarpartist regime: A state that ruled over what essentially became a non-society. No one believed in the USSR project anymore and the all invasive bureaucracy was actually necessary to prevent society from collapsing in on itself, which it did of course from the mid 1980's onwards. It was what the world came to know as Stalinism, the dead end of a failed revolution.

[Psy]

It was clearly not capitalist in any sense of the word. Commodity production? Money? Surplus value? Didn't exist.


The USSR exporting for the purpose of accumulating surplus value thus during the entire USSR into one giant corporation. The fact that the USSR was effected by the global stagnation of the 70's and 80's prove that the USSR had capitalist tendencies especially since the USSR could not solve the forces the weak global economy put on the USSR economy by focusing on satisfying domestic demands.

[Q]

The USSR exporting for the purpose of accumulating surplus value thus during the entire USSR into one giant corporation.
How was there commodity production, surplus value, money circulation? Please elaborate.


The fact that the USSR was effected by the global stagnation of the 70's and 80's prove that the USSR had capitalist tendencies especially since the USSR could not solve the forces the weak global economy put on the USSR economy by focusing on satisfying domestic demands.
You'll have to expand more about the interrelation of the USSR and the capitalist world economy. How did it affect the USSR?

Here is a review of Hillel Ticktin's book Origins of the Crisis in the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System (http://libcom.org/history/towards-political-economy-stalinism). Hillel has written extensively on the subject and criques all of the poll options inhere and predicted the collapse of the USSR back in the 1970's in his work in the Critique journal.

[CommunityBeliever]

The Soviet Union did not stick to just one system. Here are some of the notable phases of development:

1. "Military communism" during the Russian civil war (1917-1923).
2. An trasionistal phase from fuedalism and war-time damages towards socialism (like New Democrarcy in China) involving policies like the NEP (1921-1928).
3. "Borderline socialist" especially before (1938) and after (1949) participating in WW2.

Here is when things started to go downhill:

1. Revisonist/phony socialist in the mid 1950s (1955 or so) after the reign of Khrushchev.
2. State-capitalist after the Brezhnevian nomenklatura and the 1965 Soviet economic reform.

[syndicat]

Capitalism existed prior to the introduction of socalled war communism in summer of 1918...the nationalization and bureaucratic management of the economy. there was certainly never socialism there. a separate administrative layer began to consolidate its power from Oct 1917 on, and eventually coalesced a bureaucratic mode of production, where the bureaucratic class is the ruling, exploiting class.

[redhotpoker]

I always liked the term managers state.

[Delenda Carthago]

Borderline socialism until 56. State capitalism until 89.
W.B.Bland wrote a good book (http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html) on it.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Depends what era of the USSR you're talking about.

In my opinion, at times it was borderline Socialism, at other times it was a Degenerated Workers' State, at other times it was State Capitalism, and at other times it was verging on Beaurecratic Collectivism.

All of the Above and Other should have been added. I didn't vote.


The problem almost all theories have is their poor treatment integrating the perceived political economy/mode of production in the USSR with its historical context, relevance in light of historical capitalist uneven and combined development, and with the global development of capitalism generally. Also there is the simple matter than the Soviet state itself, as well as society and economy within the former Russian Empire evolved considerably through 1917-1991. The seizure of power and immediate political and social crisis, the consolidation of a Bolshevik single-party state and the beginning of the Civil War, "war communism", NEP, the great "turn" of 1928 and the First Five-Year Plan, the maturing and war-time Stalinist economy, the post-Stalin economy, and progressive decline all had changes in features.

Along with this, there's the fact many people approach "state capitalism" and "degenerated workers' state" with resort to arguments from the era of the NEP and the early Stalinist economy. The NEP had the state sector organized into autonomous "trusts" engaging in for-profit production-for-sale, hard currency and finance, small private enteprises and NEPmen, and a private agricultural economy.

Were these "trusts" like today's UK quangos and Canadian Crown corporations, or something bigger?


The mature Stalinist economy fully organized the peasantry into the state sector, either fully (state farms or sovkhozy) or in compromise (collective farms or kolkhozy), especially in the early period enterprises would be run nearly fully administratively, for production quotas, without regard to profit.

Very technically speaking, the kolkhozy weren't part of the state sector. "Socialist property in the U.S.S.R. exists either in the form of state property (belonging to the whole people) or in the form of co-operative and collective-farm property (property of collective farms, property of co-operative societies)" (1936) and "State property, i. e. the common property of the Soviet people, is the principal form of socialist property [...] The state promotes development of collective farm-and-co-operative property and its approximation to state property" (1977).


Most political economies of the USSR are very slippery with the nature, composition and origin of the ruling group and even worse with explaining the massive qualitative social transformation under Stalin's government, compared to prior to his assumption of power.

Indeed.

[Die Neue Zeit]

It was clearly not capitalist in any sense of the word. Commodity production? Money? Surplus value? Didn't exist.

Comrade, there was a generalized commodity production even without markets (GCP can happen without them), the ruble functioned as money particularly in the sphere of intermediate products (http://www.revleft.com/vb/transitional-restrictions-money-t155787/index.html), surplus value became especially more obvious as "socialist profit" starting with the 1965 Kosygin reforms (in addition to what Psy said).


Was it then bureaucratic collectivist? I remain unconvinced, although I'll have to study that idea more before giving a final opinion.

It was Coordinator Statism.


It was what Trotsky called a Bonarpartist regime: A state that ruled over what essentially became a non-society. No one believed in the USSR project anymore and the all invasive bureaucracy was actually necessary to prevent society from collapsing in on itself, which it did of course from the mid 1980's onwards. It was what the world came to know as Stalinism, the dead end of a failed revolution.

The problem with the Bonapartist label is that it overrates and simplifies the power of the state apparatus proper. The "Bureaucracy" in the economic sphere was in fact comprised of a number of institutional bureaucracies: state enterprise management, industrial ministries, finance organs, material-technical supply organs, planning organs (http://www.answers.com/topic/economic-bureaucracy), and the "central party" apparatus. The role they played sidelined the role played by the military officer corps, the KGB and MVD, and the courts.

[Astarte]

surplus value became especially more obvious as "socialist profit" starting with the 1965 Kosygin reforms (in addition to what Psy said).

This is like the argument people use when referring to the essay "Soviet Millionaires" to "prove" the USSR was "State-Capitalist". Even when these "ruble millionaires" appeared - could they open up private capitalist enterprises? Or individually or corporately, i.e. "privately" apart from the state, own means of production, or landed property? I am pretty sure the answer is no. This defies capitalism, and the utility aspect of private capital which accompanies capitalism as a hegemonic economic mode.

Also, even when these "ruble millionaires" did occur the only places they could "invest" their capital into were state enterprises, or subsidiary enterprises of the over all bureaucratic state apparatus.






It was Coordinator Statism.

I'm but a humble provincial, I am not familiar with that term - sounds interesting though.





The problem with the Bonapartist label is that it overrates and simplifies the power of the state apparatus proper. The "Bureaucracy" in the economic sphere was in fact comprised of a number of institutional bureaucracies: state enterprise management, industrial ministries, finance organs, material-technical supply organs, planning organs (http://www.answers.com/topic/economic-bureaucracy), and the "central party" apparatus. The role they played sidelined the role played by the military officer corps, the KGB and MVD, and the courts.

I completely agree.

[Die Neue Zeit]

This is like the argument people use when referring to the essay "Soviet Millionaires" to "prove" the USSR was "State-Capitalist". Even when these "ruble millionaires" appeared - could they open up private capitalist enterprises? Or individually or corporately, i.e. "privately" apart from the state, own means of production, or landed property? I am pretty sure the answer is no. This defies capitalism, and the utility aspect of private capital which accompanies capitalism as a hegemonic economic mode.

Also, even when these "ruble millionaires" did occur the only places they could invest their "capital" into were state enterprises, or subsidiary enterprises of the over all bureaucratic state apparatus.

Not at all. I have stated before the three elements needed for an economy to be properly considered capitalist: a consumer goods and services market, a labour market, and a capital market. It is very debatable to what extent the Soviet Union had the latter two: the "labour market" during and beyond Lazar Kaganovich's economic thaw (http://www.revleft.com/vb/khrushchev-thaw-kaganovichs-t152859/index.html), and the "capital market" during and beyond the 1965 Kosygin reforms.


I'm but a humble provincial, I am not familiar with that term - sounds interesting though.

It comes from the pareconist (Participatory Economics) folks.

[redhotpoker]

The main issue I see with the state capitalist label is that it implies that the bureaucracy served a purpose in production other than that of a parasite. In capitalist production if you remove the capitalist or the proletarian from the picture the system falls apart. Under the soviet model particularly early in its history if you remove the bureaucracy and top down management would you be removing a vital peace of economic machinery or a boulder on top of the proletarian?

[manic expression]

Initially a dictatorship of the proletariat, it established socialism through the advances of the workers.

[Devrim]

It was clearly not capitalist in any sense of the word. Commodity production? Money? Surplus value? Didn't exist.

At what point in the history of the USSR are you claiming that money didn't exist?

Devrim

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2219670&postcount=3

^^^ I found my original post on the subject.

I describe the USSR, overall, as the product of a deformed workers' revolution, improving somewhat on the Deformed Workers' State theory, since a state in which the workers have never held power cannot be called a 'workers' state'.

[graymouser]

The USSR kept in tact the nationalization of industry, the monopoly on foreign trade, and the central planning of production up into its last period. These three criteria formed the economic basis for the transition from capitalism to socialism, and were things worth defending even though the revolution had degenerated into Stalinism. That was the basis for Trotsky's theory of the degenerated workers' state, and with it came a defensist position on the USSR in war.

I've never been impressed by any of the other-class theories. State capitalism seems to me to be using "capitalism" not as the rule of a class as such, but as a curse word to throw at a system that the person using it doesn't like. None of the theories I've read account for how the dynamics that Marx outlined in Capital work in those societies. (Tony Cliff's attempt was almost laughable, saying that arms production = competition.) Bureaucratic collectivism was likewise never adequately theorized by its various claimants, and additionally it was primarily used to equate the USSR, Nazi Germany and the statist drift of the USA.

I've said before that the Soviet "shadow economy," to me, most clearly demonstrates what was happening in the USSR. After Stalin and particularly after Khrushchev, the whole society developed a second underground economy based on under-the-table services, bureaucratic corruption and even illegal production of consumer goods. More and more accumulation in the hands of individuals pressed at the boundaries of the system, and they wanted to invest it in profitable means. Eventually this meant that a restorationist capitalist class sat in waiting. This doesn't make sense in a state capitalist framework, where surely the bureaucrats were already the capitalist class; yet they could not use their money, it served only for hoarding and for criminal enterprise. Much of the "reform" of Gorbachev's era was simply the legalization of this shadow economy, and once unleashed it quickly became the ruling class. This simply doesn't make sense in a new-class theory, as the new-class literally would be one that bred its replacement class. If it's a caste theory, as in Trotsky's theory of the degenerated workers state, and that caste was only making itself into a class in the '60s, '70s and '80s, then this picture makes sense. To me that is more compelling than whatever verbiage you can summon up for state-cap or bureaucratic collectivism.

[Psy]

How was there commodity production, surplus value, money circulation? Please elaborate.

Imagine the USSR as a corporation, what it exported to the world market was the commodities it was producing for profit, what it produced for internal consumption is just like how some corporations offer workers benefits like free food in the break room (mostly because these are a cheap way to pacify workers).

The idea of taking production away from exports (that generated surplus value for the USSR) to directly produce utility to raise living standards of the USSR was an alien concept to GOSPLAN ans GOSPLAN only thought like capitalist managers of production. The reason why ruling class of the USSR accepted a bourgeois revolution is they understood the USSR had became uncompetitive in producing surplus value because the USSR had a problem rolling back benefits to its workers while other capitalists were making huge cuts to their labor costs and the "solution" of Gorbachev was counter-productive from the ruling classes standpoint as he was trying to increase production for domestic consumption yet that just meant higher labor costs for USSR for exports thus less surplus value from exports.

[manic expression]

Imagine the USSR as a corporation,
OK, so who owned stock in this imaginary corporation?

[Astarte]

Bureaucratic collectivism was likewise never adequately theorized by its various claimants, and additionally it was primarily used to equate the USSR, Nazi Germany and the statist drift of the USA.


That sounds more like what you read about Bruno Rizzi's work. Have you ever read "Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power"? by Wittfogel? Bureaucratic collectivism actually has been theorized in a Marxian fashion in a very deep technical manner. Maybe check it out.

EDIT: Caste theory makes no sense on any level. When you have an exalted group of men, who control all mechanisms of coercion as well as the commanding heights of the economy - it is hard to not call them a class without blushing. But over all, I think Deformed Workers' state theory of Trotskyism was a good starting place ... Wittfogel just describes what is going on a lot better - his only problem is he comes to Anti-Communist conclusions - such as saying the bureaucracy is less progressive than capitalism ... which is why he supported the West in the Cold War. I feel his work, and the real world accomplishments of the planned economy in the 20th century prove the opposite though - that the bureaucracy still represents a more progressive class, in a historical materialist sense, than the capitalist or imperialist classes.

I don't think it was so much metamorphosing from a caste to a class, but rather elements of the bureaucratic class most able to convert themselves to a viable capitalist class eventually emerged after Gorbachev's reforms. They did this because whatever capital accumulations there were had no utility.

[Rooster]

OK, so who owned stock in this imaginary corporation?

Being able to own stocks in a corporation is not the only criteria for describing a corporation and is not limited to corporations. You can own stocks in a variety of businesses and things.

"A corporation is a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual, particularly of taking and granting property, of contracting obligations, and of suing and being sued, of enjoying privileges and immunities in common, and of exercising a variety of political rights, more or less extensive, according to the design of its institution, or the powers conferred upon it, either at the time of its creation, or at any subsequent period of its existence. - Stewart Kyd

[Jose Gracchus]

The USSR kept in tact the nationalization of industry, the monopoly on foreign trade, and the central planning of production up into its last period. These three criteria formed the economic basis for the transition from capitalism to socialism, and were things worth defending even though the revolution had degenerated into Stalinism. That was the basis for Trotsky's theory of the degenerated workers' state, and with it came a defensist position on the USSR in war.

After 1928, it is very exceptionally difficult to argue the statified economic features in the USSR exhibited any benevolence toward Soviet workers. Soviet workers suffered policies which led to severe restrictions in real wages, freedom of movement, and access to basic necessities under 'socialist primitive accumulation'. The simple fact is the policies undertaken during the 'right turn' created conditions for both workers and peasants which were qualitatively worse than the worst of the famine and economic collapse during 1918-1920.

Absentism from work became an offense which could lead to assignment to a labor battalion. The USSR's economic features from 1928-1953 cannot be viewed, in my eyes, as anything other than an emulation of primitive accumulation, with all the suffering it entails for the immediate producers, by a society and state where the workers had annihilated the indigenous bourgeoisie and landowners. The proletariat was not the ruling class in the USSR, Mandelite delusions notwithstanding. The USSR was not a progressive force in a time of capitalist decline, and almost none of Trotsky's original arguments can be convincingly extended into the post-war era, and the Brezhnev Stagnation in particular.

The central planning system failed to achieve anything like actual 'planning' (one would imagine in a system of authentic planning for real use-values, one would not abolish the statistical institutions designed to track the material welfare of those direct producers who were supposedly, even according to ortho-Trot claims, the dominant social group in the USSR, while undertaking such 'planning' initiatives; but Stalin abolished tracking caloric intakes during the worst of 1929-1932). No actors within the system could act with the expectation of correct information, and they knew it. This is not planning, but a highly antagonistic social formation.


I've never been impressed by any of the other-class theories. State capitalism seems to me to be using "capitalism" not as the rule of a class as such, but as a curse word to throw at a system that the person using it doesn't like. None of the theories I've read account for how the dynamics that Marx outlined in Capital work in those societies. (Tony Cliff's attempt was almost laughable, saying that arms production = competition.) Bureaucratic collectivism was likewise never adequately theorized by its various claimants, and additionally it was primarily used to equate the USSR, Nazi Germany and the statist drift of the USA.

I realize the pamphlets you read by your leadership probably reflexively make "state capitalism" = Cliff, and "bureaucratic collectivism" = Burnham and Rizzo, but there's a broad group of theories and theoreticians on the USSR. You're basically approaching the debate as if nothing has transpired since 1955.


I've said before that the Soviet "shadow economy," to me, most clearly demonstrates what was happening in the USSR. After Stalin and particularly after Khrushchev, the whole society developed a second underground economy based on under-the-table services, bureaucratic corruption and even illegal production of consumer goods. More and more accumulation in the hands of individuals pressed at the boundaries of the system, and they wanted to invest it in profitable means. Eventually this meant that a restorationist capitalist class sat in waiting. This doesn't make sense in a state capitalist framework, where surely the bureaucrats were already the capitalist class; yet they could not use their money, it served only for hoarding and for criminal enterprise. Much of the "reform" of Gorbachev's era was simply the legalization of this shadow economy, and once unleashed it quickly became the ruling class. This simply doesn't make sense in a new-class theory, as the new-class literally would be one that bred its replacement class. If it's a caste theory, as in Trotsky's theory of the degenerated workers state, and that caste was only making itself into a class in the '60s, '70s and '80s, then this picture makes sense. To me that is more compelling than whatever verbiage you can summon up for state-cap or bureaucratic collectivism.

This is not what happened in the USSR. The bureaucracy itself could not maintain productivity, much less increase it, and the entire administered apparatus approached collapse. Blat, corruption, workarounds, the black market economy, facilitators, were part of the lifeblood keeping the sclerotic mass Trots worship as "central planning" alive as long as it did, and every sector of society was involved, not some parasitic new capitalists developing on the back. The bureaucracy sought to introduce the market in order to discipline the working-class and obliged them to accept international labor producitivity demands. Though the Soviet working-class was highly atomized socially and ideologically degenerated, in the sense of immediate power at the point-of-production, due to full-employment and the nature of wages and goods in the USSR, they were stronger than Western workers. They could control (negatively) the production process, and thereby work slow, produce defective goods, etc., and the management was forced to horde labor and thusly could not afford to discipline and dominate the laborers and the labor process adequately by "Western capitalist" standards. It became inevitable the Western-style market (in services, consumer goods, labor, and capital) had to be introduced to avoid total collapse. The transition has largely still failed though, with an extraordinary remaining importance of state sectors of economy, extra-economic power, rents on energy production and raw materials, the arms sector, the continued importance of blat and corruption and the weakness of money, the autocratic political center along with security forces being a dominant social force.

I highly recommend Chattopadhyay, Ticktin, Bordiga, Aufheben, and some others on the Soviet economy. I also highly recommend the "Open Letter to the Polish United Workers' Party".

[Jose Gracchus]

OK, so who owned stock in this imaginary corporation?

Are non-profit corporations in the West who employ wage-labor not engaged in exploitation? Is surplus value not being extracted, even if accumulation is not being realized as the level of private shareholders of the immediate enterprise? What about British coal workers employed by the National Coal Board. Are they not exploited?

I ask these questions seriously.

[graymouser]

That sounds more like what you read about Bruno Rizzi's work. Have you ever read "Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power"? by Wittfogel? Bureaucratic collectivism actually has been theorized in a Marxian fashion in a very deep technical manner. Maybe check it out.
Actually, it's not; I've read a chunk of the literature of the post-1940 Shachtmanites and the theme of universal bureaucratization was rampant. Particularly in the work of T.N. Vance, whose theory of "Permanent War Economy" was a big influence on the Cliffite tendency and was very heavily slanted in this direction.

I haven't read Wittfogel, but to comment briefly on caste theory: the reason this term is used, is because the bureaucracy was not a homogeneous class with similar interests. It was a whole system of people with different relations to the means of production and distribution, who hoarded power mainly because they controlled the latter. One's place in it was entirely political, and it seems as erroneous to call the Stalinist bureaucracy a class as it would any other political machine.

[Astarte]

Actually, it's not; I've read a chunk of the literature of the post-1940 Shachtmanites and the theme of universal bureaucratization was rampant. Particularly in the work of T.N. Vance, whose theory of "Permanent War Economy" was a big influence on the Cliffite tendency and was very heavily slanted in this direction.

Right. I have never read the Shachtmanite doctrine on Bureaucratic Collectivism, but I have read Wittfogel. What I refer to as a Marxian analysis of Bureaucratic Collectivism, Wittfogel actually refers to as the "Total Managerial State". Essentially he built on the "Oriental Despotism" of Marx. He was a member of the Frankfurt school - so I think you can expect a little better analysis than the likes of Max Schachtman would provide.


the bureaucracy was not a homogeneous class with similar interests. It was a whole system of people with different relations to the means of production and distribution, who hoarded power mainly because they controlled the latter. One's place in it was entirely political, and it seems as erroneous to call the Stalinist bureaucracy a class as it would any other political machine.

The capitalist class is not a homogeneous class either, and the interests of individual capitalists differ greatly at times - they though could agree on Capitalism as being the preferred economic mode. Likewise, the bureaucracy too was not a homogeneous class, and I am sure the different departmental bureaucrats had competing interests - but I am sure they could all agree on the the Bureaucratic mode as being in their interests. Except when they were purged - but even purge action helped maintain the bureaucratic mode collectively as the hegemonic power in society.

So was the court officialdom and the Imperial family of the Han dynasty not a ruling class, but a caste, since their place was entirely political? What about the class of enfeoffed nobility just underneath the Imperial Court, who owed their landed estates to imperial leases? Like in ancient China, the Soviet Bureaucracy essentially "enfeoffed" officials with various privileges of economic state power - the highest layers of the bureaucracy's role was not a purely political one at all, but determined the life and death of the officials who ran the economy. How do you really separate political from economic power anyway - or at least centralize economic activities and supervisory roles into state hands who have no interest in private accumulation? The only way to do it is to use state power to heavily lean on and coerce all private accumulations of capital or land - how can this be called a purely political role?

[graymouser]

I realize the pamphlets you read by your leadership probably reflexively make "state capitalism" = Cliff, and "bureaucratic collectivism" = Burnham and Rizzo, but there's a broad group of theories and theoreticians on the USSR. You're basically approaching the debate as if nothing has transpired since 1955.
Nothing worthwhile has come out of either camp either before or after 1955. I was in the ISO, I read Cliff and a number of works on state capitalist theory. I've also probably read more obscure documents from the Shachtmanites than anyone else on this board. I just don't see anything else worth replying to, as Cliff at least gave analysis of the Soviet economy a try, even if he did just come up with ad hoc nonsense to finish it up.


This is not what happened in the USSR. The bureaucracy itself could not maintain productivity, much less increase it, and the entire administered apparatus approached collapse. Blat, corruption, workarounds, the black market economy, facilitators, were part of the lifeblood keeping the sclerotic mass Trots worship as "central planning" alive as long as it did, and every sector of society was involved, not some parasitic new capitalists developing on the back. The bureaucracy sought to introduce the market in order to discipline the working-class and obliged them to accept international labor producitivity demands. Though the Soviet working-class was highly atomized socially and ideologically degenerated, in the sense of immediate power at the point-of-production, due to full-employment and the nature of wages and goods in the USSR, they were stronger than Western workers. They could control (negatively) the production process, and thereby work slow, produce defective goods, etc., and the management was forced to horde labor and thusly could not afford to discipline and dominate the laborers and the labor process adequately by "Western capitalist" standards. It became inevitable the Western-style market (in services, consumer goods, labor, and capital) had to be introduced to avoid total collapse. The transition has largely still failed though, with an extraordinary remaining importance of state sectors of economy, extra-economic power, rents on energy production and raw materials, the arms sector, the continued importance of blat and corruption and the weakness of money, the autocratic political center along with security forces being a dominant social force.
And this isn't anticipated by Trotsky's theory in precisely what sense? Trotsky viewed the bureaucracy as fundamentally parasitic; the Soviet economy was not able to run the economy efficiently or to the benefit of the vast majority of workers (beyond their basic consumption). In fact, it's the only theory that adequately explains both the ascendancy of the Soviet economy under Stalin, as the benefits of central planning, nationalization etc were in effect, and then the degeneration under the weight of the bureaucracy.

And you can minimize it all you want, but what you had was the gestation of a capitalist class underneath the surface of the Soviet economy. That doesn't make sense in the new-class theories, in which the bureaucracy's privileges as a ruling class should have made it hostile to the shadow economy.

[Jose Gracchus]

And this isn't anticipated by Trotsky's theory in precisely what sense? Trotsky viewed the bureaucracy as fundamentally parasitic; the Soviet economy was not able to run the economy efficiently or to the benefit of the vast majority of workers (beyond their basic consumption). In fact, it's the only theory that adequately explains both the ascendancy of the Soviet economy under Stalin, as the benefits of central planning, nationalization etc were in effect, and then the degeneration under the weight of the bureaucracy.

Trotsky clearly intended "degenerated workers' state" to pre-suppose a deeply restive working-class, with generational memory of the revolution of 1917, under a new and parasitic statum, but clearly meta-stable in nature. He believed that World War II would result in the workers overthrowing the bureaucracy, or the bureaucracy ultimately resorting to the forcible restoration of capitalism. It was an inherently transitory conception, and one that does not stand up to scrutiny with the post-1943 expansion of Stalinism worldwide, and the system becoming sclerotic over the course of some 60 years, only to restore capitalism with massive assaults on workers' living standards but where the working-class had essentially no response to their being overthrow as "the ruling class" of the USSR.


And you can minimize it all you want, but what you had was the gestation of a capitalist class underneath the surface of the Soviet economy. That doesn't make sense in the new-class theories, in which the bureaucracy's privileges as a ruling class should have made it hostile to the shadow economy.

There was no class hostility between the 'nascent capitalist class' and the working-class, either, which is to be expected if the workers are the "ruling class".

[syndicat]

the idea that there was a bureaucratic class dominated mode of production in the USSR doesn't depend on agreeing with the Schachtmanites.

classes are power relations between groups of people in work, and in the control of the material means of control in society. This includes control not only over the system of production and labor of workers there but also control over the armed forces and state administration.

A bureaucratic class is based on a hierarchical control structure where there is a relative monopolization over decision-making authority and expertise related to that decision-making in social production and governance of the society. Under corporate capitalism the bureaucratic class has its basis in its organizational power internal to corporations but also in the control of the state administration and the forces of coercion (military, police, prisons). it is a subordinate class to the plutocracy but also indispensable technical advisors and administrators.

within the soviet union the ruling class was made up of top political apparatchiks, industrial managers, military officers, elite Gosplan planners, etc. Their relationship to the working class was one of domination and exploitation. The surplus was appropriated by the institutional structure they ran. the bureaucratic class was itself the ruling class, not subordinate to a system of private appropriation of wealth.

[Astarte]

I've also probably read more obscure documents from the Shachtmanites than anyone else on this board.

I really have never read him, and I am gonna check the MIA, any title in particular I should check out?


And you can minimize it all you want, but what you had was the gestation of a capitalist class underneath the surface of the Soviet economy. That doesn't make sense in the new-class theories, in which the bureaucracy's privileges as a ruling class should have made it hostile to the shadow economy.

I don't think the gestation of a nascent capitalist class, and the reality of a new ruling class actually clash. It was because there was a ruling class in the USSR that some elements of it were able to position themselves properly to dismantle the bureaucratic mode and convert themselves to capitalists. Erich Honecker is a good example of one that couldn't, or didn't - his lot was completely thrown in with the bureaucratic mode - he was losing his position as a leading member of the ruling class. Same as the August 1991 coup attempt in Russia.

[tir1944]

Classes are power relations between groups of people in work...
It seems to me that,according to this definition,a factory foreman can be considered as a different "class" compared to the average worker?
Sorry if i misunderstood you.

[Dumb]

It seems to me that,according to this definition,a factory foreman can be considered as a different "class" compared to the average worker?
Sorry if i misunderstood you.

Formally speaking, class is one's relationship with the means of production. In Marxist terminology, though, there is room for a "middle class" - not that load of crap we here about all the time in American politics, but rather the petty bourgeoisie (self-employed, small-business owners, etc.). I've also seen the term applied to that thin slice of society that does not itself control the means of production, but which has a great deal of managerial authority; can anybody verify or debunk this latter definition?

[Psy]

OK, so who owned stock in this imaginary corporation?
The elite privileged class, the same class that opposed Gorbachev's reforms as it reduced it hurt their accumulation of foreign capital as to them every ruble they spend on improving the living standard of the masses was a US dollar they couldn't accumulate through surplus value through exports.

Why in 1972 did the USSR make a deal with Pepsi? There is only one reason, US dollars, the USSR ruling class wanted as much US dollars as they could get and everything that hindered their ability to accumulate US dollars was fought against by the USSR ruling class.

[CommunityBeliever]

The USSR was state-capitalist after 1965 there is no question about it. Brezhnev introduced the Brezhnevian nomenklatura (an elite class with inherited social privileges) which stratified Soviet society (this process had already began to some extent earlier with Khrushchev revisionism). As such, it is no wonder that by 1972 the USSR was forging deals with Pepsi.

[syndicat]

It seems to me that,according to this definition,a factory foreman can be considered as a different "class" compared to the average worker?
Sorry if i misunderstood you.

classes require an institutional structure that is the basis of power relations between the classes. there are two kinds of structures in modern class society that are relevant here, and both exist within contemporary capitalism:

-- a relative monopolization over ownership of means of production and other business assets which can be used to acquire means of production

-- a relative monopolization over decision-making authority and the expertise needed for such decision-making, within social production and the systems of social control

the capitalist class is based on the first, the bureaucratic class on the second.

a foreman or supervisor may be at the very bottom of the bureaucratic class, in a sort of conflicted position between the demands on them from upper management and the expectations of the colleagues they manage, but some people called "foreman" or "suprevisor" don't have even enough power to be considered at the bottom of the bureaucratic class, where they have no power to hire and fire for example.

[syndicat]

The USSR was state-capitalist after 1964 there is no question about it. Brezhnev introduced the Brezhnevian nomenklatura (an elite class with inherited social privileges) which stratified Soviet society (this process had already began to some extent earlier with Khrushchev revisionism). As such, it is no wonder that by 1972 the USSR was forging deals with Pepsi.

in the period after Stalin's first five year plan in 1929 there were special privileges and higher wages, plus administrative power, for managers and engineers etc, and deals were made with various foreign capitalists such as Ford.

[ProletarianResurrection]

Borderline socialism until 56. State capitalism until 89.
W.B.Bland wrote a good book (http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html) on it.

Id say it was borderline socialism until 1965. This was the final turning point... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform . Its easy to see mistakes looking back however I think the defeat of the Workers Opposition is much more important than anything to do with the so-called "Left Opposition" of Trotsky. Socialism has to be the empowerment of humanity and if it forgets that its in trouble.

[tir1944]

in the period after Stalin's first five year plan in 1929 there were special privileges and higher wages, plus administrative power, for managers and engineers etc, and deals were made with various foreign capitalists such as Ford. No,that's false.
"Special privileges" for qualified workers etc. were introduced already in Lenin's time,just like these "deals with foreign capitalists",the so called "concessions" on foreign exploitation of Soviet natural resources.

On "privileges and higher wages":
http://ireland.marxist.com/marxist-theory/165-ireland/8289-wage-differentials-under-lenin-and-later-under-the-bureaucracy

(Scroll down to this part) Given the delay in the world revolution and the backwardness of the country, the Soviet State was forced to rely upon bourgeois specialists to save the population from starvation...

[CommunityBeliever]

Id say it was borderline socialism until 1965. This was the final turning point...

I generally agree with that point, comrade. Additionally, this process definitely had began at least a decade earlier with Khrushchev revisionism.

[syndicat]

No,that's false.
"Special privileges" for qualified workers etc. were introduced already in Lenin's time,just like these "deals with foreign capitalists",the so called "concessions" on foreign exploitation of Soviet natural resources.

to point out that a class hierarchy and wage differentials already existed in Lenin's time...which is true...does NOT show that it is "false" that they were also a feature of Stalin's five year plans. During the five year plans, however, the wage differentials intensified and wages dropped for workers. see Sheila Fitzgerald "The Russian Revolution"

[Rooster]

Id say it was borderline socialism until 1965. This was the final turning point... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform .

So are you saying that you can reform society into different modes of production?

[ProletarianResurrection]

So are you saying that you can reform society into different modes of production?

You are approaching things to simplistically.

When the Communists seized power in 1917 Russia was capitalist, and most it remained capitalist for a good few years after outside the main industrial centres. In the same way capitalist roaders bred from the contradictions within the system that had been forced on it by the backwardness of the country and Imperialist encirclement seized power in 1956 through a coup d'etat.

[Rooster]

You are approaching things to simplistically.

When the Communists seized power in 1917 Russia was capitalist, and most it remained capitalist for a good few years after outside the main industrial centres. In the same way capitalist roaders bred from the contradictions within the system that had been forced on it by the backwardness of the country and Imperialist encirclement seized power in 1956 through a coup d'etat.

You're still saying that reformism is a mode of change for social relations. Show me the revolution that brought back capitalism in USSR.

[ProletarianResurrection]

You're still saying that reformism is a mode of change for social relations. Show me the revolution that brought back capitalism in USSR.

Uh no, people take power by seizing control of the state and than they reform the means of production.

Take into consideration the history leading up to it and than take into consideration the coup that happened and put 1 and 1 together.

[Jose Gracchus]

You are approaching things to simplistically.

When the Communists seized power in 1917 Russia was capitalist, and most it remained capitalist for a good few years after outside the main industrial centres. In the same way capitalist roaders bred from the contradictions within the system that had been forced on it by the backwardness of the country and Imperialist encirclement seized power in 1956 through a coup d'etat.

Except this is not an accurate portrayal of CPSU elite politics in the late 1950s. There was a pretty broad consensus for reversing Stalinist measures following his death; the supposed 'revisionist' bureaucrats and apparatchiks were a class created by Stalin's policies themselves. The reversals occurred gradually, with workers being granted freedom from the enterprises which essentially owned them, with minimum wage, new housing, and consumer goods being the new basis of social stability, instead of widespread terror. The Stalinist regime was one of extreme transition and forced-march development, and there was no way it could be maintained indefinitely in peacetime. Even with the Second World War bearing down on the USSR, Stalin's policies generated political opposition within even his own apparatus, hence the necessity of the Great Purge.

There was no 'coup' by 'revisionists'; one group of post-Stalinists won out managing the transition out of the Stalinist regime, over the other. Then the same happened to Khrushchev and his, by Kosygin and Brezhnev (formerly a loyal Khrushchevite) and their backers.

[manic expression]

Are non-profit corporations in the West who employ wage-labor not engaged in exploitation? Is surplus value not being extracted, even if accumulation is not being realized as the level of private shareholders of the immediate enterprise? What about British coal workers employed by the National Coal Board. Are they not exploited?
I can point to many companies in "the West" in which capitalists owned stock. It's part-and-parcel of a capitalist mode of production. I just wanted to see all these stock-holders in the USSR, and since every anti-Soviet poster seems to think it was so obviously capitalist, it shouldn't be too hard.

[Dumb]

I can point to many companies in "the West" in which capitalists owned stock. It's part-and-parcel of a capitalist mode of production. I just wanted to see all these stock-holders in the USSR, and since every anti-Soviet poster seems to think it was so obviously capitalist, it shouldn't be too hard.

If the CEO of every company in the US bought up all stock in the company to become 100% owner, would the US no longer be capitalist?

Moreover, if I start a company with my own money (while still maintaining private ownership and extracting surplus value from workers), is it any less a capitalist enterprise?

Just because something is a common ingredient does not always make it a necessary ingredient. Can you provide a source and/or argument showing why one cannot have a capitalist mode of production without outside ownership of stock?

Anyway, under the theory of state capitalism, the state and its bureaucrats are considered de facto in-house stock holders. Plus, given state ownership of Gosbank, the state could feasibly lend money to itself (and other entities) at will.

The central argument is that the USSR operated as a vertical state monopoly, controlling the financing, production, and sale stages (etc) of all ventures.

[Jose Gracchus]

I can point to many companies in "the West" in which capitalists owned stock. It's part-and-parcel of a capitalist mode of production. I just wanted to see all these stock-holders in the USSR, and since every anti-Soviet poster seems to think it was so obviously capitalist, it shouldn't be too hard.

You are dodging the question. I am not discussing the question of possible "Soviet capitalism" or not, I am asking you if capitalist relations only exist if someone has a personal title an enterprise? Does exploitation occur only where capital gains does?

Is the British National Coal Board a capitalist enterprise subject to all of the laws and principles of Marx's theory of capital? Are the workers who work for it exploited?

Do you consider stock-ownership the condicio sine qua non of the capitalist mode of production?

[manic expression]

If the CEO of every company in the US bought up all stock in the company to become 100% owner, would the US no longer be capitalist?
No, because there would still be a class of people who owned private property by law and by practice.

Did the Soviet Union have a CEO owning 100% of the stock of each state-run institution? No. The comparison doesn't fly.


Moreover, if I start a company with my own money (while still maintaining private ownership and extracting surplus value from workers), is it any less a capitalist enterprise?
It would be less of a capitalist enterprise, most likely, but still capitalist.

Did the Soviet Union have this method of setting up production? No.


Just because something is a common ingredient does not always make it a necessary ingredient. Can you provide a source and/or argument showing why one cannot have a capitalist mode of production without outside ownership of stock?
Can you show me a capitalist society without people owning stock?


Anyway, under the theory of state capitalism, the state and its bureaucrats are considered de facto in-house stock holders. Plus, given state ownership of Gosbank, the state could feasibly lend money to itself (and other entities) at will.

The central argument is that the USSR operated as a vertical state monopoly, controlling the financing, production, and sale stages (etc) of all ventures.
Again, this doesn't fly, because this supposed "de facto ownership" is imaginary. Bureaucrats didn't own private property and they certainly didn't make any capitalist profit, that's just the plain old fact of the matter.

But here's the riddle, if we're to avoid any connection to a "vertical state monopoly", then how on earth do you propose the workers handle production? This "theory" of state capitalism posits that when a capitalist market is no longer around, it's still a capitalist market...just completely centralized under a state filled with people who are objectively not capitalists. It makes absolutely no sense.

[manic expression]

Is the British National Coal Board a capitalist enterprise subject to all of the laws and principles of Marx's theory of capital? Are the workers who work for it exploited?
The British National Coal Board exists in a society in which individuals own private property (and, of course, stocks). The comparison is false unless you actually justify it. Taking one aspect of a society, isolating it and then presenting it out of context as you're doing is like taking the hereditary succession of the British monarchy and claiming nothing's changed since Richard I.


Do you consider stock-ownership the condicio sine qua non of the capitalist mode of production?
I consider it a tell-tale sign of capitalist society in the modern age. So I ask again: who owned stock in the Soviet Union?

[Jose Gracchus]

The British National Coal Board exists in a society in which individuals own private property (and, of course, stocks). The comparison is false unless you actually justify it. Taking one aspect of a society, isolating it and then presenting it out of context as you're doing is like taking the hereditary succession of the British monarchy and claiming nothing's changed since Richard I.

I am unaware I have openly promoted or defend a theory or model of "Soviet capitalism" in this thread, so stop changing the topic.

Can you explain to me how exploitation occurs in a firm merely because it is situated in a society with stock-ownership? Who is the abstract capitalist, if you will, to whom the surplus value accrues? Where exploitation occurs workers must produce surplus value for which they are (by definition) not paid. Can you explain how these relations arise out of the British National Coal Board vis-a-vis its proletarians?


I consider it a tell-tale sign of capitalist society in the modern age. So I ask again: who owned stock in the Soviet Union?

I am unaware I have openly promoted or defend a theory or model of "Soviet capitalism" in this thread, so stop changing the topic.

You implicitly have stated that exploitation may occur without surplus value accruing to private stockholders or other capital owners. Can you explain these cases in "private property societies" more thoroughly?

Also, you claimed that 'all capitalist societies' have 'stockholders'. What do you consider the material content of the Burmese Way to Socialism? Was it a "workers' state"? Was it capitalist? For insulting the idea of boiling material analysis down to single variables, you are quite wedded to your "stockholder" criterion (though of course this means that the People's Republic of China must be a capitalist state) and remarkably incurious when it comes to muddied waters of history, for example the aforementioned Burmese case.

[manic expression]

I am unaware I have openly promoted or defend a theory or model of "Soviet capitalism" in this thread, so stop changing the topic.
So the USSR wasn't capitalist...OK, what was it?


Can you explain to me how exploitation occurs in a firm merely because it is situated in a society with stock-ownership? Who is the abstract capitalist, if you will, to whom the surplus value accrues? Where exploitation occurs workers must produce surplus value for which they are (by definition) not paid. Can you explain how these relations arise out of the British National Coal Board vis-a-vis its proletarians?
Not merely because of stock ownership, but the two are connected. Whenever we see capitalism in the modern era, we see people owning stocks. I was only hoping you could point me to any such individuals in the Soviet Union.

The British National Coal Board is controlled by a capitalist state, and we know the state is capitalist because it exists in a society in which the means of production are owned privately.

[Die Rote Fahne]

State Capitalist.

[Jose Gracchus]

So the USSR wasn't capitalist...OK, what was it?

Not sure. I am just trying to ascertain why you think that the material separation of the dispossessed laborers from the conditions and products of their labor is a less important single-issue distinction than stock-ownership.

The truth is the USSR and akin societies were not socialist or commnunist in any Marxian sense, or the emancipatory sense generally envisioned by those in the revolutionary workers' movement prior to 1917. Nor do the "command economy" states exhibit all the orthodox features associated with capitalism; for instance, the 'operation of the law of value' and 'competition of capitals' is highly curtailed, if not totally suppressed. Some have questioned the genuine 'double freedom' of labor in the USSR, though characterizing it on a 'lower basis' (more akin to serf, slave, or prison labor in some sense that labor in an orthodox capitalist system), as opposed to the 'higher basis' of Marxian socialism (for example, in the writings of Hillel Ticktin, and Aufheben).

Its not necessary to use a pithy adjective to be able to meaningfully discuss the material conditions present in the USSR, &c.


Not merely because of stock ownership, but the two are connected. Whenever we see capitalism in the modern era, we see people owning stocks. I was only hoping you could point me to any such individuals in the Soviet Union.

So you are saying that "stock ownership" is the sole necessary defining criterion of capitalism. Well, as someone once said, "The comparison is false unless you actually justify it. Taking one aspect of a society, isolating it and then presenting it out of context as you're doing is like taking the hereditary succession of the British monarchy and claiming nothing's changed since Richard I." There was private property and stock-ownership in the 13th and 14th centuries in Europe. Was Europe capitalist? Was Britain fully capitalist when (and more importantly, because?) the East India Company was charted in 1600?


The British National Coal Board is controlled by a capitalist state, and we know the state is capitalist because it exists in a society in which the means of production are owned privately.

But how is surplus value removed for workers and used to accumulate capital for the benefit of capitalists via the state-owned enterprise in the UK? It has no direct stockholders. How come you don't take this same argument to apply to surplus value exploited in the Republic of Belarus?

[CAleftist]

Trying to box the USSR into one easy label seems counter-productive and impossible to me.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Just to clarify on what Jose said earlier about the ever-changing nature of the Soviet economy: going by what David Harvey wrote about Accumulation By Dispossession, something not mentioned in Paresh Chattopadhyay's work, while bourgeois economies have always had ABD (privatizations and re-privatizations, increased role for intellectual property, pension raids, no permanent subordination of finance capital towards industrial capital as opposed to trade capital, etc.), the Soviet economy since Kaganovich's economic thaw did not exhibit any of the features of ABD.

[Jose Gracchus]

The Soviet economy certainly did feature endless "accumulation by disposession" (ABD in DNZ jargon), it was just a much more primitive mode, typical of the actual primitive accumulation. It continuously moved to incorporate more and more labor from reserve sources (further intensification and proletarianization of peasantry via the kolkhoz, including, as you have noted, further wageification [including the minimum wage later on], removing women from the domestic labor pool, educating and proletarianizing pastoral, tribal, and other peoples on the margins of Soviet society, and the like). In fact, this crude mode of extensive expansion was the primary means of expansion and growth for the Soviet economy. It is for this any other reasons I remain strongly supportive of Bordiga's contention that the Soviet economy was historically essentially a lengthy transition to capitalism.

[Искра]

in the period after Stalin's first five year plan in 1929 there were special privileges and higher wages, plus administrative power, for managers and engineers etc, and deals were made with various foreign capitalists such as Ford.
Don't you dare talk bad about Stalin! :)

I voted state capitalism, cause that was pretty much it. Capitalism is not just about deals with Pepsi it's about having rulling class and proletariat. It's about working class being alienated of its work etc.

[La Comédie Noire]

Bonapartist Regime that allowed the conditions for capitalism to grow without the deleterious effects of Imperialism on development. Which I don't think is a choice?

EDIT:

Took out the pre, in preconditions, the conditions for capitalism were already present in Russia 1917, but because of the lack of markets and rival imperialist powers it would have been taken over by foreign investment and made a client state. I think Russia and China were lucky in that they were big enough to fight off the encroachments of the imperialist powers, or at least bargain with them.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The Soviet economy certainly did feature endless "accumulation by disposession" (ABD in DNZ jargon)

I was just too lazy to type the full term. :blushing:


It continuously moved to incorporate more and more labor from reserve sources (further intensification and proletarianization of peasantry via the kolkhoz, including, as you have noted, further wageification [including the minimum wage later on]

I don't think the proletarianization of the Soviet peasantry post-Stalin was ABD, unless of course existing kolkhozy were expropriated then consolidated into sovkhozy. Historically the minimum wage signifies a move away from ABD, not towards it.


removing women from the domestic labor pool

There's no dispossession there. :confused:

Not every instance of proletarianization exhibits ABD.

[Jose Gracchus]

There's no dispossession there. :confused:

The same essential mechanism is at work: value from outside the exchange-economy is extracted from sectors previously outside its dynamic. Women increasingly had to bear a 'double burden' which amounts to forcible accumulation when you consider the restriction on living standards implicit due to overaccumulation in the heavy industrial and military-security sectors, and the accelerating collapse of the Soviet extensive industrial regime. The labor was extensively appropriated in order to sustain accumulation rates, but the resource and labor barriers to this method were reached eventually.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Are you implying that "ending the economic family" (my Theory thread) is itself a form of accumulation by dispossession? :confused:

That entails removing women from the domestic labour pool as well.

[Jose Gracchus]

The women are forced to yield wage-labor to the industrial apparatus, while still having to bear most of the domestic labor in the 'economic family' as you put it; the system is obliging her to surrender more labor-power while allocating the same or less for reproduction of the working-class.

Total socialization of domestic labor must accompany the woman's exist from the confines of the home and into a human community. You can't make people poor and need to just work harder to get by, now split between two masters. Living standards should be broadly rising.

[tir1944]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/8marta.jpg


http://images4.cpcache.com/product_zoom/54394944v14_480x480_Front_Color-Black_padToSquare-true.jpg

Posters against "kitchen slavery"

[Lucretia]

Thanks for starting this thread. I think it's the first of its kind here on revleft.

[Rooster]

I would characterise the USSR as one massive Owenite village where the workers had no control over production, where production and the society were seen over by the factory owner and his colleagues, with the goods and services provided by said owners but ultimately with the end to create profit and surplus value.

[ColonelCossack]

When do you mean?

[Rooster]

Posters against "kitchen slavery"

So? I'm pretty sure women still had to do house work and still had to go to work. Who was it that said that the USSR had to increase the numbers of people producing to help it accumulate capital?

[Jose Gracchus]

Slogans don't mean it was successful. Women remained largely domestic servants for the male household head, whose labor was favored.

[La Comédie Noire]

Thanks for starting this thread. I think it's the first of its kind here on revleft.

I agree, it's great for someone who is new to the debate, like me, to see all the alternative theories of the nature of the USSR laid out.

I mean it's fashionable to think of the 20th century as a fight of **DEMOCRACY** vs. **SOCIALISM** but obviously things were a lot more complicated than that.

[tir1944]

I'm pretty sure women still had to do house work and still had to go to work.Well maybe the NKVD should have checked every home to see if it was the husband who washed the dishes.:laugh:
Also,are you seriously advocating that women should not work?
This is new...in the 20th century at least one of the goals of the women's liberation movement was to be able to work.

[Jose Gracchus]

Marx called for the socialization of domestic labor to alleviate woman's double burden as proletarian - domestic and wage-labor. The "Soviet" Union sought to reproduce this proletarian exploitation.

[tir1944]

Marx called for the socialization of domestic labor to alleviate woman's double burden as proletarian - domestic and wage-labor.
And doesn't the opening of nursing homes,schools and canteen for everyone mean the "socialization of domestic labor"?

[Jose Gracchus]

Uh, no. Communal living does, and the drastic reduction of the working-day, as also proposed by K. Marx.

[CAleftist]

The same essential mechanism is at work: value from outside the exchange-economy is extracted from sectors previously outside its dynamic. Women increasingly had to bear a 'double burden' which amounts to forcible accumulation when you consider the restriction on living standards implicit due to overaccumulation in the heavy industrial and military-security sectors, and the accelerating collapse of the Soviet extensive industrial regime. The labor was extensively appropriated in order to sustain accumulation rates, but the resource and labor barriers to this method were reached eventually.

So did the Soviet Union retain capitalistic social relations, then?

[Jose Gracchus]

Certainly.

[tir1944]

Uh, no. Communal living does, and the drastic reduction of the working-day, as also proposed by K. Marx.
Well,incidentaly,many Soviets did live communaly,you must have heard of the infamous "shared appartments"?
As for the drastic reduction of the work-day,well,that simply wasn't possible to do i let's say 30s.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I don't agree with either the author's reliance on Weber with respect to bureaucracy or the underestimation of bureaucracy as a process, but this is good commentary:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=bciQpfRc87IC&pg=PA228&lpg=PA228&dq=%22socialist+alternative%22+%22eddy+u%22+%22mod ern+bureaucracy+during+the+transition%22&source=bl&ots=yGKe6t6beq&sig=-2Kri9vS2HtF-W9gEnQplXHzqJM&hl=en&ei=xBaoTv2NMoX9iQKg3KCtDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false


If there is an analytical lesson to be learned from the demise of Soviet-type societies, it is not about capitalism's future as much as it is about the socialist alternative itself. Specifically, it is about the role of modern bureaucracy during the transition to socialism. The place of such administration is quite unclear in Marx's and Engels's famous but terse exposition of the transition to socialism. With Lenin and Mao, modern bureaucracy became an object of opprobrium. But socialism, like capitalism, is a system of division of labor. Its long-term feasibility has to be based on members of the workforce consenting to their assignments and subordination within the workplace, which is precisely what did not occur in Soviet-type societies.

[...]

Theories of possible future socialisms thus need to address not only the role of modern bureaucracy but also its political implications during and after the transition to socialism. They must not disregard Weber as previous theories and practice of socialism did.

[RNL]

I always find myself objecting to the terms of this debate, because it seems to be premised on the coherency of the notion of 'national economies'.

It seems like a more sensible question than "was the Soviet Union socialist/state-capitalist/degenerated workers' state/whatever?", which falsely places the 'national economy' in conceptual isolation, would be "how did the Soviet Union fit into the global capitalist system?" That is, what were the relations of dependency, exploitation, mediation, etc, between the Russian working class, the international working class, the Soviet bureaucracy, the international capitalist class, etc. Now, those issues are being raised, but the entire debate seems to be framed in terms of the USSR as an autonomous/autarkic 'national economy'.

[Book O'Dead]

I am curious as to what revlefters consider the USSR.

Dead?

[Jose Gracchus]

http://books.google.ca/books?id=bciQpfRc87IC&pg=PA228&lpg=PA228&dq=%22socialist+alternative%22+%22eddy+u%22+%22mod ern+bureaucracy+during+the+transition%22&source=bl&ots=yGKe6t6beq&sig=-2Kri9vS2HtF-W9gEnQplXHzqJM&hl=en&ei=xBaoTv2NMoX9iQKg3KCtDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

This is social democracy. Marxian socialism does not have as its goal, "submission of the workforce to assignments," but the aboltion of wage-labour and the formation of a material human community. This methodological framework is hopeless. Complaining about Soviet labor obedience!

[Thirsty Crow]

This is social democracy. Marxian socialism does not have as its goal, "submission of the workforce to assignments," but the aboltion of wage-labour and the formation of a material human community. This methodological framework is hopeless. Complaining about Soviet labor obedience!
Yeah, the troublesome aspects of social relations in former USSR amount to the lack of labour discipline. Holy hell.

Though, apart from that ridiculously idiotic conclusion, I'd endore the thrust to pay more attention, and in a more sound theoretical manner, to isses of bureaucracy and the division of labour.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ The author did precisely that, by asserting that the Soviet bureaucracy wasn't bureaucratic enough in its processes.


This is social democracy. Marxian socialism does not have as its goal, "submission of the workforce to assignments," but the aboltion of wage-labour and the formation of a material human community. This methodological framework is hopeless. Complaining about Soviet labor obedience!

I just clarified my position above. :)

If we go by one Pat Devine's functional vs. "social" division of labour, then there are certain processes ("bureaucracy") that are needed to maximize output for work in any given functional division of labour. In relation to those rotated into administering, directing and planning (1)... those in creative activity (2), caring and nurturing (3), skilled activity (4), and unskilled and repetitive activity (5) need to "consent to their assignments" during the whole time they're not rotated out.

[Jose Gracchus]

Shut up. No one cares about your Burheimite ravings. That has nothing to do with a real social analysis of the content of the USSR, something youve never bothered to provide us with, despite having time to use every discussion as feeble and ultimately failed effort to give publicity for your half-crocked ideas.

[tir1944]

Thank you for this great and immensely informative/useful post,Jose Gracchus.

[Die Neue Zeit]

No one cares about your Burnheimite ravings.

What I wrote has nothing to do with Burnheim. I brought Pat Devine into the picture, which also addresses the class nature of the USSR. :confused:

A sufficiently pervasive culture of job rotations gets rid of the coordinator class that would otherwise be in charge of some sort of Coordinator Socialism (neither the most extreme forms of State Capitalism nor the lower phase of the communist mode of production). Every cook could be prime minister, but the functional point is that you can't get rid of administration, direction, and planning as a function or group of functions.

That's it: I think I'll cast my lot with the Bureaucratic Collectivist crowd just to see the vote tally.


publicity for your half-crocked ideas

Does it really boil down to policy-making expertise vs. mere labour disputes, cheap sloganeering, and consensus ineffectiveness?

[Rafiq]

Uh, no. Communal living does, and the drastic reduction of the working-day, as also proposed by K. Marx.

When was this "proposed" by Karl?

[marl]

Socialism until Gorbachev - but the socialist model itself changed, and I'd say:
NEP: Borderline socialist
Stalin's early years: Bureaucratic collectivism
Stalin's complete compilation of power: Deformed or degenerated workers state
Khrushchev: Marxism-Leninism
Brezhnev: Deformed/degenerated Marxism-Leninism
Gorbachev: State capitalism

[thefinalmarch]

Socialism until Gorbachev - but the socialist model itself changed, and I'd say:
NEP: Borderline socialist
Stalin's early years: Bureaucratic collectivism
Stalin's complete compilation of power: Deformed or degenerated workers state
Khrushchev: Marxism-Leninism
Brezhnev: Deformed/degenerated Marxism-Leninism
Gorbachev: State capitalism
What is a "Marxist-Leninist" mode of production?

btw the USSR was blatantly private capitalist by the time of gorby